Butchering day.

[farmaholic]

This thread just got slaughtered.

[sumdumguy]

What's going on? Survivalists in the crowd?

Hey guys, just in case you need a little advice today, If I was going to raise anything for survival, rabbits would be number 1. You just need a pen and 2 rabbits. Before long, you'll have many. Don't know how they tase, but am told they are delicious.

[farmaholic]

Well now, if you have two of the same gender, you will only ever have two meals. Choose your rabbits wisely sumdumguy.

[burnt]

Interesting thread. Very interesting!

Freewheat, I'm with you completely in the chicken raising department. We raise our own and enough for our kids and they all pitch in to help butcher them. As well as have gardens...

I don't think that independence is over-rated at all.

Look up EMP threat, or solar flares and electronics...

[burnt]

Your thread brought to mind this piece that I wrote around Thanksgiving time a couple of years ago. Don't remember if I posted it here previously or not. sorry to bore you if I did -

Original Design

Heritage Foods

I recently read a captivating piece by Rosie Dimanno in the Toronto Star in which she recounted her family’s food traditions. In an age where most nourishment comes in foil wraps and plastic packs, the story of her parents’ labor of love in feeding their family is truly legendary. And one to which I can fully relate!

It brought back childhood memories of fall butchering on the farm where I was born – Dave Oesch, the neighborhood butcher, would come on a preset date and the hogs would squeal their last protest before succumbing to the “bonk” and being turned into cured hams and sides of bacon hanging from hooks in the smokehouse, or stuffed into sausages for canning or freezing. And although Dad considered it a near-delicacy, I never could develop a taste for headcheese . . .

The sausage-making detail was perhaps the most interesting as the process took place on the kitchen table – the grinder was clamped to the table and those slender, pink strands of ground pork squeezed through the screen were simply fascinating to a small child! Then, the sausage stuffer was clamped to the table top and Dave would form the ground meat into large balls which he would slam down into the cylinder so hard that occasionally a bit of fat would shoot back up and stick to the ceiling above the table. Mom was not as impressed as I was! “Can’t have any air pockets in it!” Dave would quip.

Now, some 50 years later, although all our grown-up children are fully intimate with the rigors of being raised on the farm, I still call them home for the annual chicken butchering in the late summer. Because I want them to never forget that food comes at a cost – there is literally blood and sweat involved in keeping our bodies fed. One of my greatest, recent joys is seeing our new daughter-in-law fuss over her garden and stand at the kitchen counter, elbow to elbow with my wife, avidly chopping her fresh garden produce and fitting it into jars for canning. She is quickly learning how to feed herself and her family.

This is a reality that has been lost on several generations whose closest connection to food production is driving past a corn field on their commute to the cottage. “Get off the road with your slow machinery, farmer”.

It concerns me deeply that in the present season, we have a whole crop of consumers who mistakenly believe that the value of food is simply a number on the price sticker. No understanding of the true cost at all – the risk in planting tomatoes for that sauce, the sore back from weeding those garden plants, the weight of the worry brought on by drought or the threat of an early frost, the ache of finding a momma cow mooing over her stillborn calf – these real costs never enter the minds of consumers as the food we grow crosses their palates.

Then I read Rosie’s story and became blissfully aware that there is at least one “city person” out there that remembers the true “cost” of food . . . maybe that is why a tear slid down my cheek, evoked by the resurrection of memories of my own, and the knowledge that a few others still know why we should be thankful in this season.

JES/10/06/12

[bucket]

Freewheat

If you rub the comb on a chicken apparently you can put it in a hypnotic state.

I can't do it but I have watched my brother in law do it so well I could lay the chicken down on the block and chop it's head off without a fight.

[agchat]

Free wheat you sure do bring back memories. Those things one experiences in life is for sure in my mind a memory to look back on, something to treasure. I must admit though you must live in gods country. Here raising chickens was always a battle to try and keep them alive. Foxes for starter was a problem, we always had to keep ours penned up. Even penned, those ****ing mink were a pest hard to keep out. Wait untill some morning you go out and over half of them are dead from a mink. After that happens a few times, the sport is not much fun any more.

[agchat]

Oh ya, two things we noticed here after we got rid of chickens, was one the lice in the barn milking cattle backed way off, and two the gophers in the pasture disappeared when we stopped shooting the foxes. They had to work a little harder to get there food. Now that I think of it between cleaning the chicken house, delicing and debeaking them when cannibalism started, na I will just buy them from you now, lol.

[wmoebis]

Bucket one time at a family get together we kids had all mom's flock (50) hypnotized at once.
Not sure who had more fun us kids or grown ups watching.

[sumdumguy]

Farmaholic is right. He must know that it's not easy determining the sex of a rabbit. They are a bit like chickens. The rooster pecks on hens head to fertilize the eggs, you know.

[fjlip]

It is true, we played with the bantams that way too.

[tweety]

10% of the income for food. I'd say that's pretty cheap.